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GMOs blasted, backed at 9 1/2-hour Longmont meeting

Boulder County commissioners to decide on management of public croplands

By John AguilarFor the Times-Call

Posted:
12/09/2011 10:15:40 AM MST

Updated:
12/09/2011 11:24:31 AM MST

LONGMONT -- A boisterous crowd of hundreds -- at one point punching through the Longmont Conference Center's fire occupancy limit and forcing an attached room to be opened -- had their say about genetically modified crops Thursday night and Friday morning during a 9 1/2-hour public hearing on Boulder County's proposed Cropland Policy.

Dozens of speakers stood before the county commissioners to either vent about the dangers of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, on open space land or to herald them as a sensible science-based solution for an increasingly populous and hungry planet.

Conventional farmers demanded they be given the freedom to grow the crops they want while organic farmers and gardeners denounced GMOs as a dangerous experiment. Tempers became short at times, with members of the crowd clapping, laughing and shouting out and prompting Commissioner Ben Pearlman to plead repeatedly for order.

The meeting, which started at 6 p.m. Thursday, ended at 3:30 a.m. Friday.

The public hearing was the culmination of more than two years of debate, public meetings and committee reports about how Boulder County should manage agricultural activity on open space acreage.

The final decision on the proposed Cropland Policy rests with the commissioners, though no date has been set for a vote.

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Boulder resident Brook Stableford, who opposes GMO crops, incorporated some performance theater into his 3-minute presentation, pulling out a cigarette and comparing the practices and assurances of the agribusiness industry to those offered by the tobacco industry decades ago.

"It's the same scam all over again," Stableford said.

Daniel Bush, one of several Colorado State University professors who spoke in defense of bio-engineered crops, called the GMO detractors members of an "anti-science movement."

"They are ignoring the science because they don't believe it supports what they believe," he said. "It becomes a religious belief in some ways."

Genetically modified corn has been grown on some of the 16,000 acres of cropland owned by the county for about a decade. But the current debate over GMOs on county-owned land was sparked in 2009 after six local farmers asked permission to plant sugar beets that were engineered to resist the herbicide Roundup.

After a series of heated public meetings, the Boulder County commissioners decided to delay the decision about sugar beets until the open space department could create a comprehensive cropland management plan.

In September, the county's Cropland Policy Advisory Group recommended that genetically modified plants be approved if the crop can be shown to reduce the impacts of pesticides on people, water and soil quality.

But last month, the Food and Agriculture Policy Council and the Parks and Open Space Advisory Committee both voted to support a phase-out of GMOs.

Thursday's crowd split starkly between both recommendations.

Several longtime farmers said the use of GMOs has increased their crop yields and decreased their dependence on pesticides.

Arlene Penner, a fifth-generation farmer in Lafayette, denounced others' attempts to curtail the use of GMOs.

"I feel that we are fighting for our very lives," she said. "We are under attack by a multi-million dollar organic farming sector."

But Cara McMillan, a Boulder resident, countered that large agribusiness entities like Monsanto are simply holding farmers hostage with patented seeds and technology that are difficult to abandon once planted.

"Farmers have been conned," she said. "They don't mean to poison their children, they don't mean to poison themselves, but that is what is happening."

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